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I think it's increasingly hard to have deep self-knowledge without entering the darkness in some way.

Sam Keen

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Sam Keen
Age: 55
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Without
Self
Hard
Way
Increasingly
Think
Entering
Thinking
Darkness
Deep
Knowledge

More quotes by Sam Keen

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The first part of the spiritual journey should properly be called psychological rather than spiritual because it involves peeling away the myths and illusions that have misinformed us.
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I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.
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When you genuinely lose your illusions, you begin to marvel at things, because you don't have the answers any more.
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The spiritual mind is always metaphorical. Spiritual thinking is poetic thinking. It's always trying to put a very diaphanous experience into words, realizing all the while that words are inadequate.
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Throughout my life, I've had different metaphors for freedom. At one time, it was skin diving. In the ocean you feel weightless you escape from gravity.
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Without reverence we [people] will gradually descend into ecocide. In the degree that the imperatives of the market - the temple of the Mall - govern our lives, we are in escalating danger of destroying the commonwealth of all sentient beings - bugs and bees and buntings - on which we depend for a luxurious life on planet earth.
Sam Keen
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Compassion begins with the acknowledgment of the single inescapable truth that is the foundation for the possibility of love between human beings - an awareness of the tragic sense of life.
Sam Keen
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If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.
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The sacred is discovered in what moves and touches us, in what makes us tremble.
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The more we chase away the false mysteries - those things we think we know about ourselves and others - the more mysterious our existence becomes.
Sam Keen
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Chronological time is what we measure by clocks and calendars it is always linear, orderly, quantifiable, and mechanical. Kairotic time is organic, rhythmic, bodily, leisurely, and aperiodic it is the inner cadence that brings fruit to ripeness, a woman to childbirth, a man to change the direction of his life.
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Our minds, bodies, feelings, relationships are all informed by our questions. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what you search for. And what shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking.
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Human beings are what I think of as biomythic animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.
Sam Keen
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If we come from good families where we have been supported well, there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the culture's values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to find out who we are.
Sam Keen
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In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.
Sam Keen
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The 'still, small voice' of God never calls on me to be like another man. It appeals to me to rise to my full stature and fulfill the promise that sleeps within my being.
Sam Keen
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Each day befriend a single fear, and the miscellaneous terrors of being human will never join together to form such a morass of vague anxiety that it rules your life from the shadows of the unconscious. We learn to fly not by being fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.
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To really love a person completely is to come to a point where your stories are intertwined.
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To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.
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Soul grows in communion. Word by word, story by story, for better or worse, we build our world. From true conversation - speaking and listening - communication deepens into compassion and creates community.
Sam Keen